As another AuDHD Iwish it was so.

Then I could just blink them and get benefits.

Instead I sometimes can't follow a book that is both engaging and interesting to read because 3 pages in my brain will throw at me at least one novel story plot bunny, musing on alternative solutions to whatever is the problem in the book, musing on implementing things from the book, possibly multiple software project ideas, etc.

And all of the above can happen for both fiction and non fiction.

And then come the interrupts while trying to focus, which quickly lead to situations where I can't focus due to expectation of interrupt, which only then leads to doom scrolling because it both fills a need to do something and is worthless enough to not care about being interrupted

Backing this one up with my own experience of ADD (I was never hyperactive):

I've tried all the distraction reducing techniques, and the distraction reducing techniques have been tried on me.

In school, I was, at least 70 percent of the time, sent to the isolation desk, facing a wall, only a pencil. This didn't help.

I've tried going to remote cabins, no internet. I've tried no devices. This did not help.

The problem (so far as I've come to understand) is not that I am unusually susceptible to distractions, it's that it's unusually difficult to convert 'needing to do something' into 'focus'.

The problem is not that something derails the train, but that there's no tracks. Starting something does not make it more likely that I'll continue it. Going in a direction doesn't have 'momentum'.

This is very difficult to understand, since it's not really 'a tendency that everyone has but more', it's a different brain. You aren't going to understand it by going 'oh like when I'm distracted', you have to try and create a picture from scratch, not based on your experience, but by listening to people.

Not that what people tell you should be just immediately imported into your worldview, people sure can be wrong about themselves. But you can't necessarily check other people's experiences against your own.

(The word "you" in this comment is referring to the general non-ADHD person)

Yeah, just when people who have never experienced depression, anxiety, and panic attacks tell me to "think about something else"...

I can't focus either especially if there are any sounds, for possibly different reasons than ADD/ADHD, but Lord knows, I am full of psychiatric co-morbidities.

> Backing this one up with my own experience of ADD (I was never hyperactive):

I'd like to add also that a lot of people without ADD/ADHD think "hyperactivity" must be stereotypical "hyperactive annoying brat that acts out", something that is still haunting diagnosis in Poland.

Meanwhile a lot of people sorta "channel" the hyperactivity in different ways - I personally have tendency to do all sorts of stimming-like behaviours that are pretty much "designed" to not make a mess where I am, or purely mental stuff, then "acting out" physically a bit when I am completely in private.

Unless of course I could hit the right kind of tasks to do that nicely slot exactly where my ADHD shines (Flying airplanes is wonderful)

I feel that reading example in my bones.

I *can not* count the number of times I've been reading something I want to be reading in a perfect environment, only to have to re-read pages because while I was mechanically reading, my brain was somewhere else entirely. It's usually when I go to turn/click to the next page that I realize I have no idea what I just read.

Not the parent, but I'm also AuDHD. My current drunk baboon is named OOH LOOK, SHINY but sometimes it's named THIS IS BORING LETS GO DO SOMETHING ELSE.

A sufficient dose of a medically prescribed stimulant medication quiets him down enough to usually ignore him, for me. It's been literally life changing. My lack of concrete executive function cost me the job of a lifetime.

Same here. I went through college and grad school by sheer will over sleep. Once I allowed myself to think that maybe it was ADD I got a prescription and now I get twice as much done with half the effort. It's frustrating as hell, all that time I spent...when I could have done more while also invested more time into my family.

With all the disclaimers of talk to your own psychiatrist noted, I’m curious what specific medication is helping you. I went through a similar process and some of the side effects were too much to balance.

Grandparent commenter here.

I'm on the Oregon state health plan, which requires you to cycle through any of the standard ADHD drugs before they'll let you prescribe the long term versions.

The lowest dose of adderall (sp idk) didn't do much for me, but the next level up silenced the distraction demon pretty well. I ended up trying ritalin next, and am currently on the second highest dose of the long term extended release version.

I was able to notice adderall's stimulant effects, but I didn't notice ritalin's. That got me in trouble on the second day of taking the high dose long term one, or should I say it got me in trouble at 5 AM the next morning. Folks, always modify your full screen games to include a real time clock. It's important.

For now I find it to be acceptable. I've adjusted my schedule to make sure I take the meds on time and go to bed on time. Additionally, thanks to it I now have enough executive function to not only make a schedule but actually be able to mostly stick to it.

Again, this stuff can be life changing. If you have the opportunity, go a month or two with all of the major drugs to see what they do for you. I'm 44 and could have been diagnosed and on meds at 11. Don't wait.

Vyvanse here. Very "soft" compared to other ADHD meds.

Thank you!

As a diagnosed ADHD. Nope. I found them boring and I used none of them except Instagram but I use it to dump some photos and contact friends only (Less than 1hr per week). It is not YouTube or Netflix or you name it either. It is about the executive function. Even if I sit in front of the work my brain will not do it. For example when I watch a lecture or read a book, knowledge just cant get into my brain. But sometimes they do, and when they do, I cannot stop it either. There are numerous times I kept coding until my blood sugar was too low that I almost passed out because I counldnt stop to grab some food. For me, ADHD symptoms are that I have no control over my attention.

Fair warning, what will write only applies to my circumstance and I have no intention to denigrate the life experiences of others.

I used to prescribe myself labels like ADHD. In fact I probably got into this habit at a very young age since people around me were already talking about labels and how they did or didn't apply to me, and I soaked all this up as children are wont to do.

I no longer abide by such labels anymore and still live comfortably. I discovered that what I called "ADHD" and motivated me to get on the Ritalin/TODO list/5-alarms-a-day train was my method of relieving myself from stress. Distracting myself was my way of coping with stress I found impossible to deal with or even approach at a lower level.

And historically, I had experienced the consequences of not distracting myself firsthand. In the past, when I forced myself take breaks and do literally nothing for a week at a time, I was stressed for what seemed like no reason for every waking hour. The stress would only be relieved when I went back to distracting myself with something (on my computer, at work, etc.). The difference was I was previously unable to recognize the cause of this stress and this address it effectively.

When I was able to address the underlying cause of stress (and this lurked in the background for years or even decades and would not have appeared consciously without heavy-duty and sustained focus), my desire for Facebook-Twitter-HN disappeared overnight. So did my stimulant prescription.

With that, the label "ADHD" disappeared as well. I called myself that a lot over the years. It turns out I was just fighting myself the whole time for seeing myself as "too weak" to deal with being unable to sustain "attention", and targeting my distraction as if it were the ultimate cause, not the symptom it really was. The stress was the real problem, and it remained latent for years without me so much as thinking of it.

On top of being distracted all the time from stress, my belief was if I couldn't stick to a stringent schedule with every minute detail mapped out for each day, I was a failure. Because my impression was that that's the standard you needed to set for yourself to address "ADHD", and if you weren't putting in your reps, your condition would dominate you and you'd live a miserable existence... which made miserable, which only made me believe more strongly in this narrative, and so on in an endless spiral.

I should mention everyone around me also believed in the "disease model" of psychology, so they only served to reinforce these beliefs. I think I renounced this model a bit too strongly in hindsight, as a few of my relationships have been left permanently altered as a result.

Now I don't bother to follow a strict schedule except for work things. I clean my place on Sunday. That's my only real obligation I've set for myself. Things that "need to be" done somehow get done automatically - because I don't need to pressure myself into doing them, I just want to, and they don't take much time. I no longer feel the need to sweat any of those details or micromanage my own life anymore, and instead just take life as it comes.

It shouldn't come as a surprise that I've never been happier with myself living this way.

Yeah so that's the thing. In my case, I'll call what I received from my therapy "a self-goodness". I think others may term this nebulous quality "self-esteem", "a deeper understanding of the universe/cosmos/God", "motivation", "confidence", and so on. But "self-goodness" is something I came up with so it resonates with me personally.

In my case, "solving stress" (or perhaps "reaching inner peace" in my own words) meant being capable of enjoying whichever activity I put my mind to, success or failure, and being able to look forward to the future in a generally positive light.

But hold on. This sort of thing I had already read in probably dozens of pithy self-help books for years in the past. It is not knowledge that I nor I'm sure many other people don't already know. And it is repeated in places like here and elsewhere ad infinitum.

What I accomplished was not being made aware of what the solutions out there are, but becoming able to enact such solutions I had heard over and over and over again for years for my benefit, but couldn't, because of what most people would call depression.

But this is only a surface-level answer. Allow me to go deeper still:

The main lesson I learned, and try to put into practice each day now, was that a fulfilling life needs to be experienced, not taught. Basically, it's the difference between watching a video of someone bungee-jumping, and actually bungee-jumping yourself. I think concepts like "qualia" and the "Mary's room" thought experiment are relevant here. A good example of this is talk therapy. In my case at least, talk therapy was ineffective because my therapist had all the experience and was eager to tell me all about it, but because of the limitations of words, she could only impart knowledge to me, and prod me in directions I was unwilling to go in to begin with. That leads to guilt and shame for not living up to the expectations or suggestions of others, and led nowhere.

So beyond an issue as simple as "being depressed" and "going to therapy" to try to solve it, my issue was this: due to limitations of my experience (commonly termed "depression" by most people), I was unable to impart any meaning to the knowledge I did have so that I could put it into practice, and thus gain experience in a way that brought me satisfaction. And I had a lot of knowledge, through endless rumination about how best to deal with my situation that didn't lead to a conclusive answer for a long time. None of that knowledge made me happy or brought results. And with no way to enjoy experience, I had no force driving me to get it for myself.

Okay, so what is to be done about these problems?

That's the thing. Literally nothing I've just told you in the paragraphs above would have put me even one step closer to solving my issues - because I'd heard it all before, for years. In fact, there are entire systems like the authors of self-help books that basically rehash versions of the above treatises in endless different flavours - all of them having little effect except imparting knowledge when the optimal solution would be to impart experience.

This limitation is not the fault of those self-help authors. Because they're only using the tools they know how to use - words. And mere words have their limits. In fact, since my psylocibin therapy I've opened quite a few self-help books and remarked just how much I agree with pretty much everything the authors say - because I have enough experience and knowledge to just agree with them and learn nothing profound. The difference between now and then was my willingness to put such knowledge to use. I am convinced that none of those very self-help books would have ever taught me how to cultivate that willingness with any amount of hard work. My belief is that it is extremely hard or impossible to discipline yourself into gaining this willingness with effort, especially if you are already depressed.

(Aside, this is why I find Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus so fascinating - it mirrors the way I see the world now, by building up an extremely complex system of interlocking rules only to declare all of it nonsense in the end, stating that there are certain things beyond mere words that still hold importance to philosophy.)

No, more fundamentally, what I lacked was this willingness to experience things in life - a sense of "self-goodness". This is the thing that lets one convert knowledge to experience. It's motivation, focus, confidence, ability to just get-up-and-go without being prompted, and so on. I know what this is now, and I didn't have it before. I can now engage it at will pretty much every day and get good results. I did not understand (experientially) such a thing existed before my therapy. It was all new experience to me, even if I had knowledge of what it was supposed to be like by reading books, watching romantic comedies, etc.

So how did I obtain this "self-goodness"?

My whole life, society had told me that reward only comes with hard work. If you don't put in hard work, you don't get results, and are screwed. This reflects poorly on yourself, and you need to try harder. Going to talk therapy was one way of "putting in the hard work", and yet I never got results. It was clear that this way of viewing the world was not helping me.

Instead, what I needed to be taught was that this fundamental "self-goodness" is not an experience that can be earned, or transmitted via talking about what it is logically - it must be given, and for free. Most people I suspect receive this self-goodness in childhood by parents that give unconditional love to them, and there aren't as many problems. I was not so lucky, so I had to obtain this sense elsewhere. In order to gain this sense, I needed an experience that I did not have to work for. I had worked as hard as I could my whole life and it did not amount to inner peace.

So where is this experience to be found?

That's the tricky thing. I can only speak for what worked for me, which is psylocibin therapy with a licensed therapist. Some people have religious awakenings. Some people build networks of friends and gain experience that way. In my own experience, nothing other than the correct drug would have done any good. I had several prescriptions for things like stimulants and SSRIs at the time. I tossed them all away the day after. I say this, but ultimately I do believe the "chemical imbalance" theory of depression carried some validity in my circumstance - insofar as it allowed me to get over what seemed like the impossible hurdle of gaining self-goodness, after which I no longer had to bicker about such theories anymore. There are too many more important things to focus on. Psylocibin promotes neuroplasticity in the correct circumstances, so it may have just been a matter of the proper neurons not being linked up in just the right ways. Sometimes (but not always), I reflect and think that's really all it came down to in the end.

But I can rest assured that such an experience took barely any effort to gain, even though I was trapped in my own web of rules and logic. That was the whole point. There is no virtue in fighting so hard for something you were supposed to have been given for free. That sort of effort makes you look at the people who do have self-goodness act so effortlessly and wonder why they deserve that automatic self-goodness and you don't. I think feelings like those drive a lot of sadness between people in the modern world.

Coming back to "stress", I stopped worrying about it so much once I became occupied so much with fascination with the world around me. In fact, stress stops being something to be "solved", but to be tuned up and down according to one's desires. If I relax too much, I wonder what I'm making of myself and strive to work on a skill or two to fill the time. If I work too hard, I desire more time to myself. So stress becomes a sort of neutral force in the world that accompanies your travels. It reemphasizes how a balance in all things is important to keep in mind, even for issues that you may at first desire to "solve" somehow.

In the end, even my rumination served a purpose. I can now put the sizeable stock of knowledge I gained to good use in earning experience. But now my quantity of knowledge looks so small in hindsight, and makes me realize I have a lot to learn. I am quite excited to learn about new things each day.

Ironically, nowadays I end up agreeing with the self-help authors that "effort is rewarding", with regards to things like exercise, cooking, my job, creative pursuits - in every circumstance except gaining a sense of self-goodness. I think many of those authors never had to deal with trying to cultivate self-goodness from absolute nothingness, and thus have no words to describe what such a process is like, so all they can say is things like "you can do it, I believe in you" and "I don't have anything else to tell you". It is my belief that this single idea is one of the most misunderstood self-help mantras in existence. The people who need to hear it the most are the ones who are served by it the least. And some of those who speak about it at length, even with the best of intentions, will end up talking past a lot of desperate people who need to feel an inner peace for themselves to be able to have any chance at understanding it at all.

I really appreciate you taking the time to write this all out for me. I’ve read through it several times now with a couple breaks between.

If I were to summarize, it’s about enjoying the process rather than the result. Much easier said than done, but the ideal goal. The thing that keeps me and people like me from enjoying the process is the constant background of “is this going to be worth it”. Perhaps just the awareness of seeing this happening in real time could help in cutting short that enjoyment-blocker. To call it out and label it as such.

I’m not looking for a response from you, but wanted to take the time to thank you for writing this all out.

No problem! Even if I understand that, in a way, everything I wrote is just nonsense if kept as a jumble of words and not put into practice, I wrote it in such a way that perhaps someone like past me could see relatively easily that there are still solutions out there within reach, even for someone like them. :)

Thanks for sharing.

> Now I don't bother to follow a strict schedule except for work things.

Huh, "just" that? If I could do that I'd feel like I'm on the freaking top of the world.

Yeah, I get it. It really is exactly how you describe, compared to how I lived before at least - like being on top of the world all the time. No organizational tools or anything required, except maybe a couple calendar reminders for big events each month. No alarm either, now I wake up naturally each day and still get enough time to prepare for work each morning and maybe even watch a bit of TV. (To be fair, I'd probably want to schedule things more often if I had more social obligations to fulfill, but I'm relatively alright working on things by myself right now.)

I did purchase a fitness monitor though, which I found an excellent investment since it provides me with ideas as to how I should spend my energy (exercising or recovery). But it doesn't really impose any "must-do" activities; it only reflects the state of your body day-to-day and leaves the rest to you. I'm already motivated enough to hit the gym for 30 minutes whenever I feel up to it, so it's just an extra thing on top to track my progress.

It's not like every single day is perfect or anything - example, today I fumbled my sleep schedule and couldn't as get much done - but even the off days I can accept with a feeling of grace knowing they're only temporary, and even times like these are necessary in reaching happier places.

I'm glad you worked it out!

Interesting. If it's not too personal, would you mind sharing what the "cause" turned out to be, and how you were able to discover it?

Bit too personal for me to talk about sorry, but the therapy that worked was psybocilin (magic mushrooms) with a licensed counselor. Specifically a dosage of 5g taken in intervals + intensive guidance.

I can say that if I chose to remain too squeamish to ever try the "scheduled drugs" route, my life would have marched onward in an alternate timeline with little to no hope for recovery.